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Thoughtbot open sources Copycopter

Thoughtbot, a web design and development agency, recently announced it would be shutting down its Ruby on Rails based Copycopter system for live editing of Rails application text by clients. The company has now announced that it is open sourcing the application under an MIT licence.

Copycopter is designed for Rails application developers who have many clients and enables those developers to allow their clients to change the text content of applications the developers have written for them in a safe and controllable manner. Copycopter uses the I18N API of Rails as a route to let a central application, the Copycopter server, manage changes to the text of an application. Clients of a developer can log in to the server and make changes to selected text elements in their application. The application, which can be running on another system, needs to be Copycopter enabled; when enabled, the Copycopter client code will download and update the application's text elements from the Copycopter server.

Thoughtbot says it was unable to make money with Copycopter, which it had hope to run as a service for other developers, and has now open sourced it. Two Copycopter users, Crowdtap and Iora Health are taking over the maintenance. The source code for the application's server and client are available on github and a video guide in the announcement details the process of using Copycopter.